Segment 8 (18) Overcoming the Challenges of Collaboration

[Paul Terlemezian]

Panelists:

• Ann Cramer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-cramer-b101255/
• Jim Everidge - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimeveridge/
• Doug McMahon https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-mcmahon-7a8a1668/
• Frank Merritt - https://www.linkedin.com/in/talentquest/
• Robert Pittman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-pittman-4a568a11/

Moderator: Brian Dooling - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dooling/

Remarkable Speaker:  Gary Schuster - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-schuster-9367682a/

 

This segment is focused on collaboration between businesses.

What norms, laws, aspects of human nature impact the ability of businesses to collaborate?

As the client - do you wish your providers to compete to win your business and then collaborate to assure your success?

As a CEO - how do you assure the right mix of competition and collaboration?

As an investor - what do you expect from the companies your investments support?

What best practices of corporate collaboration have you experienced? Which best practices are the hardest to sustain?

[Bill Crose]

As techies, we felt pretty accomplished after finishing version 1 of our Pythia Specification, a system that simply, verbally delivers step-by-step directions to a WiFi earphone, then reports how long it takes users to complete each step. While the design would clearly accomplish the tasks of identifying learning, process improvement, environmental, and other needs while assuring performance & quality, we felt apprehensive about something but didn't quite know why. Through the technology, system users would collaboratively, albeit unintentionally, provide data that would be used to determine needs. The users would essentially be treated like a team of Borg (Star Trek reference) whereby no individual thought could be encouraged or rewarded. Our feeling of "apprehensive" was the right word because we would essentially "apprehend" the data from users; the conscious, intent of providing information was completely missing. The design was very high tech as techies would have it, but also very low touch. So, we added a function that asks users to optionally provide feedback at the end of every process they complete. They can now skip the step or give a detailed response as they choose. It's like a high tech suggestion box with all the benefits. The intent of consciously contributing to improving the work, collaboration, was enabled and our apprehension was removed.